Imgur accepts $40 million investor payday

Add another name to a growing list of niche firms that spur the investor checkbook until they love it. Image sharing company Imgurannounced on Thursday that it would accept $40 million in a Series A from powerhouse VC firm Andreessen Horowitz.

Imgur makes it very easy for its 130 million monthly visitors to scan through its book of weird, humorous, and sometimes serious images.

“If it’s a viral image on our platform, then you are immediately going to like it, and you’re going to want to see more, and you’re going to get sucked in, and that three minutes [of free time] you had is going to feel like five seconds,” CEO Alan Schaaf told the Chronicle last December. (He did not return comment today.)

Imgur is also something of a testament to companies focusing on a couple critical tasks and doing them very well. Schaaf founded the company in his dorm room because, as he says, every other photo sharing site “sucked.” The idea was that Imgur would allow anyone to post and share images — now encompassing memes, screenshots, photoshopped pictures and everything else in between — to the Internet in just a couple clicks and with the user’s dedicated URL. Schaaf posted the site to a forum on Reddit and redditors ran with the service, serving as the catalyst to a site that now serves 1.3 billion image views each day.

Schaaf did take a $25,000 grant from Ohio University to get the business running while he was in school, but has avoided the investor checkbook, espousing the merits of independence. Code repository and developer social network GitHub had been a huge proponent of “bootstrapping” as well before taking $100 million also from Andreessen Horowitz.

But maintaining growth in today’s digital world requires cash. Imgur was profitable, drawing revenue from premium features and some advertising, but seemingly not to the point where it could invest those earnings back into capital that would keep it ahead of Tumblr, YouTube, Pinterest, Facebook — all with deep pockets — and any other social network that occupies people’s eyeballs online.

So an injection of cash from Andresseen Horowitz might do the drink.

Schaaf told The New York Times that Imgur’s first priority will be to hire more engineers and build new applications to bolster user experience on smartphones, where people increasingly consume their content, while waiting in line for coffee or at the doctor’s office.

Tim Hwang, founder of a conference about Internet culture and memes, recently came on board to head “special projects” like partnerships. Schaaf also said the company would upgrade offices and bolster staff on the sales team.

No doubt they’ll have to learn to say the company’s name. (It’s “image-r”)